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Universal Internet Currency: Combating Advertising on the Internet
Ads. They are everywhere. They are laced into your social media streams — sometimes posing as “real people”. The precede and even intercede with video content. They interrupt the flow of your music streaming.
In fact, they interrupt everything.
Want content? You must accept ads.
Even if you “pay to remove ads”, that “blackmail money” rarely removes all advertising. Some content (which is never identified, by the way) will continue to have ads anyway — despite paying. See SiriusXM and Hulu for prime examples of “premium service” that still forces ads.
The solution, of course … run an ad blocker. Blocking ads used to be complicated (a trip to your HOSTS file and a constant update of ad servers) — but over time, blocking ads became two clicks of a button.
That’s where we are now — a crazy war between content providers who desperately want the system to continue to be the same as it was and consumers that have had the genie let out of the bottle that simply won’t stand for it any more.
